The Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company (SALIC) announced it was leading a £7m ($8.8m) funding round of investments into artificial intelligence startup Hummingbird Technologies, according to the company.
Hummingbird, which was set up in 2016, uses drone and artificial intelligence to provide advanced crop analytics to farmers. Hummingbird, using imagery and data analytics from satellite, drone, plane and robot technology, along with proprietary algorithms, provides farmers with high-resolution maps of their crops at critical decision-making junctions in the season.
SALIC is owned by the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund.
Hummingbird offers a range of different services across crops such as Cereals, Potatoes, Soybean, Sugar Beet and Oilseed, the company says on its website. These services include crop stress detection, diseases detection, weed grass mapping, nutrient management mapping as well as yield prediction and plant counting in row crops.
“As a machine learning business, our technology thrives on having more data to work with. Gaining access to Salic’s portfolio gives us an unprecedented opportunity to hone our capabilities even further,” Hummingbird’s CEO Will Wells said.
